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US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

thehill.com

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Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#551

Post by technothrasher »

Loquebantur wrote: post #526
tashoecraft wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VFX artists react had a pretty good video where they're pretty sure the footage over the ocean is just a bird. The oddness is due to the camera optics and the vessel that's recording it traveling extremely fast.

Do you assume, US fighter pilots get stumped by birds often? I find it really remarkable how far behind the curve HN is on this topic. It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all. Yet here people behave like their own grandfathers. TheHill.com reports on Congress acting on the mounting evidence for ET craft crash retrieval programs illegally hidden from democratic oversight, people on HN discuss whethe…

> It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all.

It's not avant-garde at all. It's the same old nonsense that comes around every 10-20 years with new lipstick on it. The "pilots are trained observers" canard is literally the same shtick from all the way back to Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers from 1947. After going around this hamster wheel a bunch of times, forgive me if I'm not excited by another round of "the evidence is about to be released any day now" chatter.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#552

Post by somewhat_drunk »

Spooky23 wrote: post #544
Loquebantur wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you assume, US fighter pilots get stumped by birds often? I find it really remarkable how far behind the curve HN is on this topic. It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all. Yet here people behave like their own grandfathers. TheHill.com reports on Congress acting on the mounting evidence for ET craft crash retrieval programs illegally hidden from democratic oversight, people on HN discuss whethe…

The Hill is reporting on the shenanigans of opportunist or dumb as rocks congresspeople who figured out there’s some demographic of marginal voter who cares about this.

Exactly. That right wing grifters have piled onto the current UFO conspiracy push doesn't lend it any additional credibility. If anything, it detracts from it.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#553

Post by midoridensha »

JohnBooty wrote: post #539
tptacek wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely true that, if the USG were in possession of extraterrestrial technologic artifacts (ETA's, must credit me for this coinage), it would be illegal for people with firsthand knowledge to disclose them. But lack of firsthand evidence of ETA's does not constitute evidence of the existence of ETA's. It would be illegal for me to disclose the existence of a +4 Wand of Magic Missile, too, if such a thing exis…

But lack of firsthand evidence of ETA's does not constitute evidence of the existence of ETA's I said this. So... yeah, agreed. The rest of this: I don't care, except that you have to work yourself into contortions to simultaneously argue that all firsthand reporting of ETA's has been stymied by legal threats from DoD Your logic is incorrect. First, the whistleblower protection is new. It hasn't been around very long…

>Personally I don't believe it's aliens. I find it incredibly unlikely that alien races would send crewed ships here and then be clumsy enough to crash them or get shot down.

It's unlikely, but it's possible. Maybe the aliens are rather primitive technologically, and have weapons technology similar to cannons from sailing ships in the 1700s (and spacecraft technology otherwise resembling our early 1970s craft), but they somehow discovered a simple but somehow-overlooked portion of physics that allowed them to build spacecraft that could instantly teleport across the galaxy.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#554

Post by rodgerd »

heavyset_go wrote: post #511
ALittleLight wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they first released the CIA psychic documents I clicked a few at random and my impressions were much different. The papers I read were very much "We're conducting this experiment on remote viewing. Here are our procedures and results."

The government threw a lot of money at that and did direct experimentation, but dig deeper into the weird claims some of those that were adjacent to remote viewing were making/continue to make outside of that and you start getting into that territory. Things like aliens, teleportation, levitation, pyrokinesis, etc. I remember seeing one document that was about a person claiming to being able to do some kind of telepo…

I hope you've taken the time to read The Men Who Stare At Goats, which is definitely solidly in the "tax dollars went where?!" genre.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#555

Post by justinclift »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #532
jstarfish wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.

I don't think that would be the case for being presented with such a big discontinuity. Comparing it to the space race isn't accurate because while we hadn't achieved spaceflight before we had pretty much mastered atmospheric flight and were using turbojet engines and rocket powered planes to reach the stratosphere and even the mesosphere before the first man reached orbit. We were steadily going higher and higher so…

That being said and all, who knows what people could learn from say... the equivalent of the ashtrays, doorknobs, toilets (etc) in hypothetical alien vehicle(s).

Wouldn't have to be the biggest challenges getting solved right away. Alien "mundane, old crap" would probably turn out pretty useful too. :D

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#556

Post by m3kw9 »

Really hope they produce something other than blurry videos with 8bit shadows(tall green man), blurry standard disc looking flying object, again on 70s vhs quality, and “riveting” interviews of space alien tech recoveries. It’s been a clown show so far this century.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#557

Post by tiahura »

throwaway743 wrote: post #492
tiahura wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mental gymnastics is believing little green men, capable of sidesteping special relativity, travel X lightyears just to fly around San Diego and occasionally crash somewhere in the desert.

This is a very narrow perspective. We've only been around for ~200,000 years, only began to take flight 120 years ago, and flew to the moon around 60 years ago. There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone, a good percentage likely harbor intelligent life, and that life could have easily established civilizations that go back millions of years. Should they have developed tech, even at our pace, they ar…

Doesn’t just the idea of a craft - that’s either FTL or teleports - reaching Earth and them having engine trouble, seem a little silly?

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#558

Post by midoridensha »

Hikikomori wrote: post #513
quickthrowman wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now apply Occam’s razor to the following two choices: 1. Aliens have visited Earth. They crashed their spaceships or we shot them down. The US Government (and possibly other governments) retrieved and studied their technology and managed to keep it a secret for decades 2. Aliens have not visited Earth

And somehow these alien crafts are capable to cross interstellar distances but then crash at a rate higher than our airplanes, unless of course there's a shitload of them flying around here.

Scenario 1: the alien craft are piloted by teenagers and stolen from their parents to go on joyrides.

Scenario 2: the aliens are bumbling and incompetent, and stole their spacecraft tech from some more intelligent race. (You could call them "pacleds")

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#559

Post by Dylan16807 »

themagician wrote: post #517
Dylan16807 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lost, but it wasn't a military loss, it was a catastrophic failure of diplomacy. We had control for a long time.

It was a military loss. When one military quits and runs away really fast that’s a loss. And it’s not the first time. When the US loses they hold a parade and say, “We left.” Such a joke. And American citizens never hold their government accountable. Instead they just believe the BS and do it all over again. Kind of amazing, really. No shame.

Vietnam was a military loss.

If you have control of an area and mismanage it for years, that's not a military loss. Failure at that point is something different.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#560

Post by cgriswald »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #499
zeitgeistcowboy wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While people in the 1850s probably would not have been able to fix or turn the iPad on they would have been able to examine it. They could have taken it apart and looked at the various materials and perform physical and chemical tests on them. They could open up some of the electronics and look at them with a microscope. The understanding of electricity, circuits, and electrical devices in the 1850s was developed eno…

Quite generous of you to assume the aliens are only (the equivalent of) ~150 years ahead of us. Would the ancient Egyptians have had as much success reverse engineering an iPad as some Victorian-era scientists? It seems the crucial element (pardon the pun) is that they wouldn't know what to look for. The Victorians knew enough about chemistry that they could figure out the material composition of various components.…

No, that does not follow.

You're arguing for a sort of technology threshold beyond which we cannot see (presumably within a reasonable time frame). However, which side of said threshold we are on, even for technology from a civilization a million years older, isn't clear. I am not convinced it can be clear, since we'd be arguing about properties of a hypothetical craft.

A time-based argument is probably not useful. The difference between ourselves and ancient Egyptians is huge, but it isn't from exponential change in technology over time. That change in technology was driven by (and drives) both our different (from the Egyptians') model of the world, and our ability to sense the world.

Consider a recovered alien ship hull. If it crashed in ancient Egypt, they might make use of the metals and conclude the ship was a god or its vessel cast down from the heavens. If it crashed in the modern United States, we could figure out the chemical makeup of it, test its properties, hypothesize about how it works, and try to recreate it. All of that could wind up being incredibly valuable, even if we couldn't recreate the shell itself.

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